Pastwatch

by Orson Scott Card

  Why is it, thought Tagiri, that even though I know that within a few minutes I and my dear husband and my precious son Acho will almost certainly wink out of existence, it is Diko that I am grieving for? She is the one who will live. She is the one with the future. Yet the animal part of me, the part that feels emotion, does not comprehend my own death. It is not death, when the whole world dies with you. No, the animal part of me only knows that my child is leaving me, and that is what I grieve for.

  She watched as Hunahpu helped Diko up the ladder, then walked to his own hemisphere and climbed.

  And now it was Tagiri’s own turn. She kissed and embraced Hassan and Acho, and then climbed her own ladder, up to the locked cage. She pressed the button to open it as Manjam and Hassan also pressed their widely separated buttons, as Diko and Hunahpu and Kemal pressed the buttons on their field generators. The lock clicked and she pushed open the door of the cage and stepped inside.

  “I’m in,” she said. “Release your buttons, travelers.”

  “Get in position,” called Sá.

  Tagiri was now above the hemispheres and could see as Kemal and Diko and Hunahpu curled up on top of their equipment and supplies, making sure that no part of their bodies was under the field generator or extending beyond the boundaries of the sphere that the field generator would create.

  “Are you ready?” called Sá.

  “Yes,” answered Kemal at once.

  “Ready,” said Hunahpu.

  “I’m ready,” said Diko.

  “Can you see them?” called Sá, now talking to Tagiri and to the other three watchers who were in position to see. All of them confirmed that the travelers seemed to be in a good position.

  “When you are ready, Tagiri,” said Sá.

  Tagiri hesitated only a moment. I am killing everyone so that everyone can live, she reminded herself. They chose this, as much as anyone with imperfect understanding can ever choose. From birth we all were fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place. This litany of justification passed quickly, and again she was left with the pain that had gnawed at her for the weeks, the years of this project.

  For a fleeting moment she wished that she had never joined Pastwatch, rather than to face this moment, to have it be her hand that pulled the switch.

  Who else’s hand? she asked herself. Who else should bear this responsibility, if I cannot bear it? All the slaves waited for her to bring them freedom. All the unborn children of countless generations of humanity waited for her to save them from the withering death of the world. Diko waited for her to send her out into the great work of her life.

  She grasped the handle of the switch.

  “I love you,” she said. “I love you all.”

  She pulled it down.

  10

  _____

  Arrivals

  Did the Lord say that Cristoforo would be the first to see the new land? If he did, then the prophecy must be fulfilled. But if he did not, then Cristoforo could allow Rodrigo de Triana to claim credit for seeing land first. Why couldn’t Cristoforo remember the exact words the Lord said? The most important moment in his life until now, and the wording escaped him completely.

  No mistaking it, though. In the moonlight seeping through the clouds everyone could see the land; sharp-eyed Rodrigo de Triana had first seen it an hour ago, at two in the morning, when it was nothing but a different-colored shadow on the western horizon. The other sailors were gathered around him now, offering their congratulations and cheerfully reminding him of his debts, both real and imaginary. As well they should, for the first to see land had been promised a reward of ten thousand maravedis a year for life. It was enough to keep a fine household with servants; it would make de Triana a gentleman.

  But what was it, then, that Cristoforo had seen earlier tonight, at ten o’clock? Land must have been close then, too, scarcely four hours before de Triana saw it. Cristoforo had seen a light, moving up and down, as if signaling him, as if beckoning him onward. God had shown land to him, and if he was to fulfill the words of the Lord, he must lay the claim.

  “I’m sorry, Rodrigo,” called Cristoforo from his place near the helm. “But the land you see now is surely the same land I saw at ten o’clock.”

  A hush fell over the company.

  “Don Pedro Gutierréz came to my side when I called him,” said Cristoforo. “Don Pedro, what did we both see?”

  “A light,” said Don Pedro. “In the west, where the land now lies.” He was the King’s majordomo—or, to put it bluntly, the King’s spy. Everyone knew he was no particular friend to Colón. Yet to the common sailors, all gentlemen were conspirators against them, as it certainly seemed to them now.

  “I was the one cried ‘land’ before anyone,” said de Triana. “You gave no sign of it, Don Cristóbal.”

  “I admit that I doubted it,” said Cristoforo. “The sea was rough, and I doubted that land could be so near. I convinced myself that it could not be land, and so I said nothing because I didn’t want to raise false hopes. But Don Pedro is my witness that I did see it, and what we all see now bears out the truth of it.”

  De Triana was outraged at what seemed to him to be plain theft. “All those hours I strained my eyes looking west. A light in the sky isn’t land. No one saw land before I did, no one!”

  Sánchez, the royal inspector—the King’s official representative and bookkeeper on the voyage—immediately spoke up, his voice whipping sharply across the deck. “Enough of this. On the King’s voyage, does anyone dare to question the word of the King’s admiral?”

  It was a daring thing for him to say, for only if Cristoforo reached Cipangu and returned to Spain would the title Admiral of the Ocean-Sea belong to him. And Cristoforo well knew that last night, when Don Pedro had affirmed that he saw the same light, Sánchez had insisted that there was no light, that there was nothing in the west. If anyone was going to cast doubt on Cristoforo’s claim to first sighting, it would be Sánchez. Yet he had supported, if not Cristoforo’s testimony, then his authority.

  That would do well enough.

  “Rodrigo, your eyes are indeed sharp,” said Cristoforo. “If someone on shore had not been casting a light—a torch, or a bonfire—I would have seen nothing. But God led my eyes to the shore by that light, and you merely confirmed what God had already shown me.”

  The men were silent, but Cristoforo knew that they were not content. A moment ago they had been rejoicing in the sudden enrichment of one of their own; as usual, they had seen the reward snatched out of the hands of the common man. They would assume, of course, that Cristoforo and Don Pedro lied, that they acted from greed. They could not understand that he was on God’s mission, and that he knew God would give him plenty of wealth without his having to take it from a common sailor. But Cristoforo dared not fail but to fulfill the Lord’s instructions in every particular. If God had ordained that he be first to lay eyes upon the far-off kingdoms of the Orient, then Cristoforo could not thwart God’s will in this, not even out of sympathy for de Triana. Nor could he even share some portion of the reward with Triana, for word would get out and people would assume that it was, not Cristoforo’s mercy and compassion, but rather his guilty conscience that made him give the money. His claim to have seen land must stand unassailed forever, lest the will of God be undone. As for Rodrigo de Triana, God would surely provide him with decent compensation for his loss.

  It would have been nice if, now that all the struggle was near fruition, God had let something be simple.

  No measurements are exact. The temporal field was supposed to form a perfect sphere that exactly scoured the inside of the hemisphere, sending the passenger and his supplies back in time while leaving the metal bowl behind in the future. Instead, Hunahpu found himself rocking gently in a portion of the bowl, a fragment of metal so thin that he could see leaves through the edges of it. For a moment he wondered how he would get out, for me
tal so thin would surely have an edge that would slice right through his skin. But then the metal shattered under the strain and fell in thin crumbling sheets on the ground. His supplies tumbled down among the fragile shards.

  Hunahpu got up and walked gingerly, gathering up the thin sheets carefully and making a pile of them near the base of a tree. Their biggest fear, in delivering him on land, was that the sphere of his temporal field would bisect a tree, causing the top half of it to drop like a battering ram onto Hunahpu and his supplies. So they had put him as near the beach as they dared without running a serious risk of dropping him in the ocean. But the measurements were not exact. One large tree was not three meters from the edge of the field.

  No matter. He had missed the tree. The slight miscalculation in the size of the field had at least been in the direction of including too much rather than slicing off a portion of his equipment. And with luck they would have come close enough to the right timeframe that he would be in good time to accomplish his work before the Europeans came.

  It was early morning, and Hunahpu’s greatest danger would come from being sighted too soon. This stretch of beach had been chosen because it was rarely visited; only if they had missed their target date by several weeks would someone be within sight of him. But he had to act as if the worst had happened. He had to be careful.

  Soon he had everything out of sight among the bushes. He sprayed himself again with insect repellent, just to be sure, and began the labor of carrying everything from the shore to the hiding place he had selected among the rocks a kilometer inland.

  It took him most of the day. He rested then, and allowed himself the luxury of pondering his future. I am here in the land of my ancestors, or at least a place near to it. There is no retreat. If I don’t bring it off, I’ll end up as a sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli or perhaps some Zapotecan god. Even if Diko and Kemal made it, their target dates were years in the future from this place where I am now. I am alone in this world, and everything depends on me. Even if the others fail, I have it in my power to undo Columbus. All I have to do is turn the Zapotecs into a great nation, link up with the Tarascans, accelerate the development of ironworking and shipbuilding, block the Tlaxcalans and overthrow the Mexica, and prepare these people for a new ideology that does not include human sacrifice. Who couldn’t do that?

  It had looked so easy on paper. So logical, such a simple progression from one step to the next. But now, knowing no one in this place, all alone with the most pathetic of equipment, really, which could not be replaced or repaired if it failed. . . .

  Enough of that, he told himself. I still have a few hours before dark. I must find out when I have arrived. I have rendezvous to keep.

  Before dark he had located the nearest Zapotec village, Atetulka, and, because he had watched this village over and over again on the TruSite II, he recognized what day it was from what he saw the people doing. There had been no important error in the temporal field, so far as date was concerned. He had arrived when he was supposed to, and he had the option of making himself known to this village in the morning.

  He winced at the thought of what he would have to do to make ready, and then walked back to his cache in the dusk. He waited for the jaguar that he had watched so many times, dropped it with a tranquilizer dart, then killed it and skinned it, so he could arrive at Atetulka wearing the skin. They would not lay hands readily upon a Jaguar Man, especially when he identified himself as a Maya king from the inscrutable underworld land of Xibalba. The days of Mayan greatness were long in the past, but they were well remembered all the same. The Zapotecs lived perpetually in the great shadow of the Maya civilization of centuries past. The Interveners had come to Columbus dressed up in the image of the God he believed in; Hunahpu would do the same. The difference was that he would have to live on with the people he was deceiving and continue to manipulate them successfully for the rest of his life.

  This all had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  Cristoforo wouldn’t let any of the ships sail for land until full light. It was an unknown coast, and, impatient as they all were to set foot on solid earth again, there was no use in risking even one ship when there might be reefs or rocks.

  The daylight passage proved him right. The approaches were treacherous, and it was only by deft sailing that Cristoforo was able to guide them in to shore. Let them say he was no sailor now, thought Cristoforo. Could Pinzón himself have done better than I just did?

  Yet none of the sailors seemed disposed to give him credit for his navigation. They were still sullen over the matter of de Triana’s reward. Well, let them pout. There would be wealth enough for all before this voyage was done. Hadn’t the Lord promised so much gold that a great fleet could not carry it all? Or was that what Cristoforo’s memory had made up for the Lord to have said?

  Why couldn’t I have been permitted to write it down when it was fresh in mind! But Cristoforo had been forbidden, and so he had to trust his memory. There was gold here, and he would bring it home.

  “At this latitude, we must surely be at the coast of Cipangu,” said Cristoforo to Sánchez.

  “Do you think so?” asked Sánchez. “I can’t think of a stretch of the Spanish coast where there would be no sign of human habitation.”

  “You forget the light that we saw last night,” said Don Pedro.

  Sánchez said nothing.

  “Have you ever seen such a lush and verdant land,” said Don Pedro.

  “God smiles on this place,” said Cristoforo, “and he has delivered it into the hands of our Christian King and Queen.”

  The caravels were moving slowly, for fear of running aground in uncharted shallows. As they moved closer to the luminous white beach, figures emerged from the forest shadows.

  “Men!” cried one of the sailors.

  And so they obviously were, since they wore no clothing except for a string around their waists. They were dark, but not, Cristoforo thought, as dark as the Africans he had seen. And their hair was straight, not tight-curled.

  “Such men as these,” said Sánchez, “I have never seen before.”

  “That is because you have never been to the Indies before,” said Cristoforo.

  “Nor have I been to the moon,” murmured Sánchez.

  “Haven’t you read Marco Polo? These are not Chinese because their eyes are not pinched-off and slanted. There is no yellowness to their skin, nor blackness either, but rather a ruddiness that tells us they are of India.”

  “So it’s not Cipangu after all?” said Don Pedro.

  “An outlying island. We have come perhaps too far north. Cipangu is to the south of here, or the southwest. We can’t be sure how accurate Polo’s observations were. He was no navigator.”

  “And you are?” asked Sánchez dryly.

  Cristoforo did not even bother to look at him with the disdain that he deserved. “I said that we would reach the Orient by sailing west, Señor, and here we are.”

  “We’re somewhere,” said Sánchez. “But where this place may be on God’s green Earth, no man can say.”

  “By God’s own sacred wounds, man, I tell you that we are in the Orient.”

  “I admire the admiral’s certainty.”

  There it was again, that title—admiral. Sánchez’s words seemed to express doubt, and yet he gave the title that could only be given to Cristoforo if his expedition succeeded. Or did he use the title ironically? Was Cristoforo being mocked?

  The helmsman called to him. “Do we head for land now, sir?”

  “The sea is still too rough,” said Cristoforo. “And you can see the waves breaking over rocks. We have to circle the island and find an opening. Sail two points west of south until we round the southern end of the reef, and then west.”

  The same command was signaled to the other two caravels. The Indians on the shore waved at them, shouting something incomprehensible. Ignorant and naked—it was not appropriate for the emissary of Christian kings to make his first overtures to the poo
rest people of this new land. Jesuit missionaries had traveled to the far corners of the East. Someone who knew Latin would surely be sent to greet them, now that they had been sighted.

  About midday, now sailing northward up the western coast of the island, they found a bay that made a good entrance. By now it was clear that this was an island so small as to be insignificant. Even the Jesuits couldn’t be bothered with a place so small, so Cristoforo was reconciled to waiting another day or two before reaching someone worthy of receiving the emissaries of the King and Queen.

  The sky had cleared and the sun shone hot and bright as Cristoforo descended into the launch. Behind him down the ladder came Sánchez and Don Pedro and, shaky as ever, poor Rodrigo de Escobedo, the notary who had to make an official record of all deeds done in the name of Their Majesties. He had cut a fine figure at court, a promising young functionary, but on board ship he had quickly been reduced to a puking shadow rushing from his cabin to the gunwale and staggering back—when he had strength to rise from his bed at all. By now, of course, he had got something like sea legs, and he even ate food that didn’t end up staining the sides of the caravel. But yesterday’s storms had felled him again, and so it was an act of sheer courage that he could come to shore and perform the duty for which he had been sent. Cristoforo admired him enough for his silent strength that he determined that no log of his would record the fact of Escobedo’s seasickness. Let him keep his dignity in history.

  Cristoforo noted that the launch put away from Pinzón’s caravel before all the royal officials had made it down into his launch. Let Pinzón beware, if he thinks he can be the first to set foot on this island. Whatever he thinks of me as a sailor, I am still the emissary of the King of Aragon and the Queen of Castile, and it would be treason for him to try to preempt me on such a mission as this.