Last time, the book spent several pages of historical RPF before actually getting to the story that it wanted to tell, about someone who uses what is theoretically a machine to view the past to start altering it, instead, on the idea that once people understand they have the power to alter the past directly, they should use that power to prevent as much cruelty and pain as possible for the people in the past, rather than leaving the past to its suffering because the present seems pretty good.
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus: Chapter 2: Content Notes: Sexual Assault, Physical Assault, Slavery, Colonialism
The narrative continues its focus on Tagiri, having introduced her as the person who will strand Columbus and alter the timeline, explaining how she learned to use the Tempoview to trace her matrilineal lineage. I have to chuckle a little bit at the word “Tempoview” being used for the device, mostly because it’s a fairly functional portmanteau, and in our capitalist hellscape, it would likely end up being something either far more pedestrian, like a “time television” or something far more pretentious, like the “Pastwatch DeLorean” It’s the 1990s, though, and we haven’t quite yet had the corporatization and corruption of the World Wide Web and its rash of buzzword titles and names.
The matrilineal trace happens because, despite being “as racially mixed as anyone else in the world these days,” Tagiri’s matrilineal line is
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.
So there’s the juxtaposition that racism is not one of the driving forces of Pastwatch, but also there’s pride being taken in tracing and understanding your own family lineage through those times where, presumably, racism would be a very important factor in the society. Card mostly tries to sidestep this by having the village of Ikoto be mostly isolated, poor, and culturally homogeneous.
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 oold 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.
That description of the children comes perilously close to, if not falls into, a description that would be part of an advertisement from the strain of Christianity that can be flippantly described as “convert the poor darkies with the charity and wealth largesse of enlightened white people.” The description of the adults seems to play into the single story stereotype of Africa that you might find along with kente cloth and women balancing things on their head, no electricity or connectivity or signs of “civilization” from a white perspective in sight. This framing of the past as a simpler and fascinating time is also accented by Card mentioning that using the Tempoview takes “enormous amounts of electricity, but this was the dawn of the twenty-third century, and solar energy was cheap.”
Card unintentionally manages to admit that he’s working on a limited view for this in describing the “significance problem” that Tagiri runs into.
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.
He is right that computers are terrible at recognizing and classifying images, at least at this point in our history, as much as peddlers of AI would like you to believe otherwise, but the “significance problem” as described here, and the way that all of those individual actions are classified together as “the same” and explicitly saying that Tagiri has seen “every variation” on a thing makes an assumption that the differences between each of these interactions aren’t large enough to be significant in their own right. I’ll bet there are at least three graduate-level papers about the ways that the girls of Ikoto flirt, especially if there’s a courtship custom or a traditional way of flirting that’s supposed to be followed, such that you can see the differences between the girls, once you know what the Platonic form is.
Tagiri becomes important to the narrative with her research methods, first in that she doesn’t adopt the statistical methods other pastwatchers do, where they observe trends and count behaviors and write reports about that, but instead chooses to focus on individual lives. For the people observing her, they believe that she’s showing her preference to be a biographer rather than a researcher (ah, now we see the bias inherent in the system). But they are then stunned when Tagiri decides to view lives in reverse, from death to birth, rather than from birth to death. The conversations become meaningless (because nobody understands backmasking), and “she was constantly seeing the effect first, then discovering the cause.” Tagiri uses this focus on a woman named Amami. Who walks with a limp in her life, because her husband beat her, because Amami had been raped by two men from a nearby village when she went to gather 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 the 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 ahd 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: “Louko-whore!”
If we were aiming for a strong condemnation of toxic masculinity here, we could certainly do worse than this, but also, this is the kind of thing that plays into stereotypes about men, and especially black and brown men. The idea that perception is the most important thing, and that these men need to be seen as strong and in control of their wives is still a stereotype that has negative outcomes for everyone. It allows racists to see black and brown men as threats, and to also dismiss them as culturally inferior to whiteness, because of course, “everyone knows” there are no situations where white men would accuse their wives of willingly having sex with someone who assaulted them. And they wouldn’t do terrible abusive things to those women they believe are sleeping around. And there certainly isn’t any sort of political movement mostly spearheaded by white men (and some white women) to try and ensure that as a culture, we all assume that any woman who gets pregnant did so willingly and should have no other option but to birth any children that might happen from that pregnancy.
Supposedly, this action is “seven generations back” from Tagiri, so that’s about 140-200 years from the dawn of the twenty-third century, which would be 2200s, so this is happening in either our current times (as seen from the 1990s) or a little bit more in our future. So it’s Twenty Minutes Into The Future where we still have these isolated times where an accusation might destabilize a tenuous peace between villages. It sounds like what Card wants is to keep the idea of the “primitive” Africa composed mostly of villages, rather than the fact that Africa is mostly in colonial or post-colonial government and has been organized into nation-states, even if some of those nation-states are not as stable or democratic as the West would like (and others are engaged in an active campaign against the black people of their nation-states.) If Africa were more “civilized,” then this story wouldn’t work so neatly, because then there would be an authority to appeal to and a recourse that could be tried, and possibly justice that could be had by going through those processes, rather than the blithe assumption that there is no higher authority to mediate and to prosecute and therefore the man’s only options are to lose face by admitting he couldn’t protect his woman or to save face by punishing the woman for something she didn’t do. (This is also a false dichotomy, but again, this is pretty clearly someone writing outside of his lane at this point.) In a little bit, we’ll see that the Ikoto in this story is probably the one in Sudan, and at the time of writing the book, Sudan was still in the middle of a civil war (finished 2005, and then in 2011, it split into what we now call “Sudan” and “South Sudan”.) Being a future person with a history in a strife and war-torn country is going to become important very shortly.
In any case, Tagiri continues to view things in a death-to-birth manner, and the people observing her use the Tempoview continue to let her work in this manner, since they recognize she won’t fit into any of the ongoing projects, and because they’re curious to see what kinds of insights she’s going to get out of it, since viewing things future-to-past doesn’t seem to be disorienting for her in the way that it does for others. (They understand story-seekers and pattern-seekers, but they’ve never had one so interested in following effects to their causes.) Card gives us an explanation of why this is so easy for her, by giving her a backstory involving divorce and a miserable marriage.
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 experienced 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.
And thus, Tagiri can trace the misery back through the generations, all the way to this ancestor beaten unjustly as an ultimate cause, the solution to the problem of why everything kept going wrong in each successive generation up to herself.
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.
For me, the modern person, I’m reaching for explanations like the cycle of abuse, intergenerational trauma, transgenerational trauma, and other more systemic approaches, so as to make things less about the individual choices of each of the women through the generations. And even though Card is shaping the lens to be about how the choices of the women involved produced these generations of misery and trauma (and apparently, occasionally happiness?), the way he describes those choices makes me wonder how much the misery was brought on because of the decisions the women made, but the decisions the men in their lives made. Men assaulted Amami. A man decided to beat her for that assault rather than prosecute the assault. Another man was “more strong-willed and selfish” and Tagiri’s parents apparently have great animus with each other over things like status and power. I wonder if we looked at them, how much time would be devoted to how emasculated Tagiri’s father was, to have his wife on his level (or even above him) and so once he finally retook his place as the head of the household, like he was destined to, it must be some fault of hers not to accept the subordinate position and to be a doting wife and mother, rather than continue to try and pursue her career or otherwise maintain herself as a person of status and independence.
This entire subject seems to be one of those things where if the author has a woman passing judgment on other women, then it can’t be sexist or misogynistic. We see that replicated out here in our world as well, where women and wives get trotted out to espouse virulently anti-woman policies, and then all of the men who want to amplify that message point that a woman said it, and therefore it must be okay to promote such things.
Having already had her probationary period extended because she’s an anomaly in the system for her front-to-back thinking and viewing, the system formalizes her as an anomaly. It’s supposed to be a mark of uniqueness and possibly one of pride, but it can also come off as being creepy.
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 issues 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.
So, free reign to do whatever she wants, but she also has a secret spy trying to categorize and synthesize her work and her ideas without her knowledge or participation in the matter if she never produces anything on her own (and probably will do so all the same if she does). The society? University? Foundation? in charge of Pastwatch seems much less like people who do research into the past or of their own lines or do academic work and much more like a more oppressive, shadowy type of entity.
The narrative suggests that Tagiri might have stayed doing this tracing backward to forward, but that she was reliving the life of a woman called Diko who lost a son from her village and never knew what happened to him, even though her husband and the village had turned out to try and find him. Tagiri, with the power of Pastwatch, is able to trace the life of Acho, the son, and it does not end in a tragedy of a child who wandered into hostile nature, but instead with Acho encountering an “Arab” who knocks him out and stuffs him in a bag.
A slaver, Tagiri realized at once. She had thought they did not come this far. Usually they bought their slaves from Dinkas down 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 to keen for them. Most of the Muslim slavers preferred to trade for their 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.
Acho manages to survive his transport to be sold to someone in Cairo, where he is educated and roses to a position of power controlling the business interests of his owner and his owner’s son. Tagiri notes that even with his great success, Acho always has the look of someone who knows he has been stolen from the place he should be.
Card still isn’t making connections to Columbus yet, and the first example of slavery that Tagiri encounters, while almost certainly historically accurate, uses Muslims and Arabs and their African allies and procurers as the people behaving with evil that will turn Tagiri to the project of tracing the lives of the slaves (rather than the owners) and documenting them, remembering with Pastwatch the people who were likely barely a footnote of history in many cases. Even in the next paragraph, where we’ve fast-forwarded eight years and Tagiri has accumulated a research staff, as well as an upgraded viewer, the TruSite II that allows for computer translation of the past’s languages, we’re getting the context of what’s being watched (one of the last remaining “Indie” unenslaved populations, a few weeks before the Spanish come for them, pointed at them by those nations that have already been enslaved) and Hassan, the primary research assistant, is conveniently a Muslim as well, providing continuity of narrative and giving him the role of foil to Tagiri.
“The Spanish are getting desperate for labor down on the coast.”
“The plantations are growing?”
“Not at all,” 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 slaver project with her?
And so we’re getting a part of the Spanish slavery that’s not as terrible as it could have been, where they’re trying to keep the slaves alive, they’re just not very good at it. Tagiri feels the full force of the hypocrisy of the priests, but it’s not something she voices. The stated reason is because he already knows, but Hassan strikes me as the kind of man who is earnest in his desire to help and to record the stories of the past, but completely clueless about why other people can’t be as detached about this as he is. Tagiri might very well have explained it to him several times about how these are people’s lives, and Hassan might nod along, thinking he understands without fully getting it, because he’s a dude in a civilization that presumably is father along the equality/equity/justice line than the people they’re studying. The narrative took time to detail how Acho was captured and treated inhumanely by the Arab slaver, but here we’re getting a high-level overview of the situation that didn’t go into the details.
Plot-wise, while observing a man and woman talking about their dreams induced by nicotine water, the woman describes her dream of people observing her and the man from many generations in the future. Tagiri is startled about the description, but Hassan dismisses it as coincidence, except, of course, the details start coming out that make it much less coincidental.
“I dreamed that they watched me three times,” Putukam was saying, “and the woman seemed to know I could see her.”
Hassan slammed his hand on 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.
That’s, well, that’s something I might believe happens in the future where Pastwatch happens, because I am fairly certain that Muslims, regardless of what language they are speaking, are perfectly good at cursing, even to those they have respect for. It’s also interesting that Card choose what is essentially the profession of faith for a Muslim (one of the Five Pillars), and one of the ritual daily prayers, the shahadah, as the thing that Hassan says. It feels a bit like Card asked “what’s the Muslim equivalent of saying ‘Jesus Christ!’ when surprised?” and went with what he found first, rather than digging in any further to see whether it made any sense to use that phrase in that context. (A very short search dive suggests that devout Muslims, like devout Christians, are forbidden from speaking curses about others, but also that languages like Arabic have plenty of curse words that could be employed.)
Tagiri and Hassan discuss whether it is possible for the TruSite to affect the past, rather than simply observe it, with Hassan arguing that it’s not possible, because until now, nobody ever had such direct evidence, and that, theoretically, it shouldn’t be possible anyway. There’s a different gut punch that comes from the past that stands on Tagiri’s feelings of responsibility.
“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.
Tagiri immediately goes to the conclusion that if they can help the past, they should help the past, while Hassan argues that they can’t change the past, and that all of the reports and biographies that have already been published have been good enough, because now they know much more about people who were forgotten, and they have people who recognize their suffering now.
The rest of what is in store for Tagiri and Hassan is the village praying for deliverance (or a plague to wipe everyone out) to, ultimately, gods that do not save them.
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-Putukam.
They were still chanting when the Spanish, led by two shamefaced Indie guides, shambled along the path, their muskets, likes, and swords at the ready. There 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 and 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 drive his sword into the base of her throat, just above where the collarbones came 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.
Having watched the destruction of the village, Tagiri returns to the question of whether they can affect the past or not. Hassan seems unwilling to entertain the possibility, because of the theory and the unlikeliness that they could make any changes with any kind of impact on the stream if history, while Tagiri has become convinced that this event they just witnessed means it’s possible for the future to affect the past in better ways.
“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.
Maybe it’s because I know that Card leans into his Christianity hard in his life and his work, but it seems mean-spirited to have the Muslim character think of the Christians as insane for their beliefs, when it’s pretty settled, as far as I can tell, that Muslims are supposed to think of The People of the Book as people who at least worship the same deity, even if they follow different prophets to get there. (How those Muslims practice is, of course, going to have at least same variance with the doctrine, and there are different schools that prioritize the commentaries of some men over others, so it’s not unrealistic for this comment to exist, but it feels like Card is tugging on the assumed Christianity of the reader to get them to discard Hassan’s arguments before presenting the case of why, in-universe, Hassan’s arguments don’t work.)
Tagiri is correct that saving a village is too small of stakes to get Pastwatch involved in changing history rather than merely observing it, and she considers that the two likeliest positions opposing her will be the ones who are convinced that nothing Pastwatch tries to do will change the timeline in any significant way (like how the timeline of the Oxford Time Travel Universe by Connie Willis actively interferes with the historians’ abilities to travel in time so that it preserves itself and makes sure that the events that have already happened in the historians’ timeline continue to happen) and those who will want to shut down the entire project in fear that they will destroy their own timeline by making accidental changes to the timestream. Tagiri thinks both of those positions are wrong, but she can’t get any sleep after this day, and so she goes back and watches another scene – this one of Columbus landing in a space after wrecking a ship, and he and his people building a fort and trying to enslave the locals.
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 relisthed this scene, for it was one of the few victories of the Idies 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 hen 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.
So the first thing we watch after an account of Spanish brutality toward the natives (and the natives praying to the far-future observers for deliverance) is one of the few times that the natives are able to defeat the Spanish, and it becomes an equivocation in the mind of the African woman that the people who are being enslaved and attacked are just as capable of brutality as the white invaders are. It’s becoming rapidly apparent that Card is writing well outside his lane at this point and hasn’t bothered to characterize his future observer in any way that would reflect the history she has and her Arican-ness, even in this post-catastrophe future, nor acknowledging that she’s spent eight years working on this project so far and therefore has more than enough experience with how this usually plays out that she wouldn’t take the position that “ah well, they’re all being cruel to each other” given the legacies of the white Spaniard invaders and the natives who are enslaved. Yes, I’ll admit that I have twenty-five more years of the advancement of philosophy and critical race studies to draw upon than Card does in writing this, but Audre Lorde and Kimberlé Crenshaw and a lot of other academics, historians, and contributors were already well-established and published by the time Card wrote this, so it’s not like he’s trying to write a character where there’s not a corpus of work already present about how Blackness affects experiences and other such things.
Tagiri, despite having an African name, and African ancestry that she’s looking at, sounds like a white man. Hassan, the Muslim man, sounds like a white Christian man rather than a Muslim, even if he says superficially Muslim things. And the fact that I’m picking up on this, being white and perceived as a man much of the time, probably means it’s blatant and unmistakable to someone with lived experience of being a black woman or a Muslim man.
Eventually, after a long amount of thinking, watching this victory scene in the middle of the night, and seeing Columbus write back about all the riches that are available for plundering, and all the Christians to convert and enslave, even though he will die before any of the followers-on see that he’s completely right about the riches, and, according to the perspective of the Spanish, right about the potential slaves and converts, Tagiri goes to see Hassan and lays out her case why she thinks Christopher Columbus is sufficiently a linchpin of the timeline that altering the success of his voyage west will alleviate the suffering of so many slaves throughout history. She’s concluded that it’s the strength of his conviction, the power of his witness, that sends the fleets out after him, because the evidence he has is scant to nonexistent. If she can turn Columbus aside and defeat his voyage, then the age of slavery fails, the age of industrialization that builds on the backs of the age of slavery never comes to pass, and the situation that destroys the world that Pastwatch has recovered from potentially doesn’t happen.
Hassan is skeptical about this possibility, and argues for keeping the status quo, even though he will eventually be swayed to help Tagiri after this quoted part:
“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.”
There is an argument to be made here, although it will be quickly left behind in favor of Tagiri convincing Hassan that Columbus is the linchpin, about human nature and the question of whether even the Pastwatch society has progressed beyond the same things that consumed their ancestors and caused the problems. Being afraid of the consequences of their actions now is probably going to fade, even if they have the ability to watch all of history and document it to the point where when someone asks a question, they can see how the consequences of decisions played out in the past. Considering how much our current society seems interested in repeating the mistakes of the past that we have great documentation for, Tagiri probably has the stronger historical argument that it’s better to make something not happen in the past than let it happen and try to bring those affected back to health.
And, as it turns out, while Tagiri thinks about the consequences of giving herself the power of gods to change the past, she knows that she’s going to try and make the change.
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—Cristóbol Colón, as the Spanish called him; Cristofero Columbo, 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 one-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 chapter closes with Pastwatch agreeing to look into the matter, calling it the Columbus project. Hassan gets put in charge of determining whether stopping Columbus will have the desired effect, or whether they could push on another linchpin and get a better result. Tagiri gets put in charge of a team to study how the effect of affecting the past worked and how they can harness it for the desired end. Hassan and Tagiri also apparently marry and have two children, a son named Acho who becomes a pilot and roams, and a daughter named Diko who sticks close to home and observes and learns the family research project. Tagiri throws herself into the work, because she’s haunted by what might have been if slavers had come and disrupted her family, and worse, if that happened and she knew that there were observers that did nothing to help, because they were worried that it might affect them?
What would I think of them? What kind of people would they be?
Another good question that gets asked here and then left behind is what Tagiri’s motivation is. It seems pretty clear that she’s reaching for the possibility of affecting the past because she personally feels responsible for not having done anything but watched all of the atrocities of the past. We don’t see anything other than “she’s assigned a shadow observer and everyone is told not to interfere with her” as to what the ruling entities of Pastwatch think, and they eventually go along with her to see if they’re able to affect the timeline but it seems like there isn’t an IRB or other entity assigned to watching Tagiri to make sure that she stays within the accepted ethical bounds of the project. Because even though Hassan is the person assigned to figuring out whether it’s going to work, Tagiri’s the one most likely to pull the lever, regardless of whether it works or not. And to keep pulling levers until she’s successfully rid the past of the slavers that destroyed others or wiped out her own self from the timeline.
And, of course, we have to wonder about whether Tagiri’s reasoning is actually sound, or whether because Columbus is a local influencer to the time, he’s getting outsize importance from her, and the right place to start the snowball rolling is in a different place and time entirely. If, say, Europe never really emerges from the fall of Rome in 400-500 CE, but instead falls into a warring states period where no emperor can establish a firm enough foothold to birth the kingdoms/empires that will eventually turn outward to colonize, or the Muslim empires pinch Europe from all sides and conquer them instead, do the Americas and Africa stay safe from being turned into slave populations and colonies? Is the real trick to topple kingdoms and empires at the point where they start looking to other races for their slaves, so that no continent is ever able to act imperially toward another? If the goal is to defeat white enslavement of others, a specific set of actions might work. But if the goal is to stop all enslavement, them multiple interventions will be needed by default, because a lot of societies develop slavery in their history. Columbus may appear to be the charismatic person who makes the thing happen, but there’s a lot of people and things that move behind the charismatic people at the front, and often times, they’re the ones pulling the real levers of power to bring about what the charismatic person says they’re going to do. Getting rid of the figurehead often only means a new figurehead appears and the machine itself continues on unabated.
If you have machines with the ability to look into the past and view any time that’s possible, you should be able to program those machines to take the corpus of history and extrapolate and make best guesses about what history might look like by changing certain variables, to prune off decisions that have a low probability of success.
Next week, the next generation also has some thoughts about the Columbus Project and how to best achieve the goals of changing the past to a more beneficial one.
The Slacktiverse 
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