Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,10

containing Acho only once a day, to splash some water into the boy's mouth. The rest of the time the boy rode in darkness, his body cramped in fetal position. He was brave, for he never wept, and after the slaver brutally kicked the bag a few times, Acho stopped trying to plead. Instead he endured in silence, his eyes bright with fear. The bag no doubt stank of his urine by now, and since, like most children of Ikoto, Acho's bowels had always been loose from dysentery, the bag was certainly foul with fecal matter, too. But that soon grew old and dry in the desert, and since Acho was fed nothing, this pollution at least was not renewed. Of course the boy could not have been allowed out of the bag to void his bladder and bowel -- he might have run off, and the slaver was determined to realize some profit from a trip that cost the lives of his two partners.

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

Tagiri followed Acho down the Nile, by boat and by camel, until he was finally sold in Cairo. Better fed now, well-washed, and looking quite exotic in the bustling Arab-African city that was the cultural center of Islam in those days, Acho fetched an excellent price and joined the household of a wealthy trader. Acho quickly learned Arabic, and his master discovered his bright mind and saw to his education. Acho eventually became the factotum of the house, tending to all while the master was off on voyages. When the master died, his eldest son inherited Acho along with everything else, and relied on him even more heavily, until Acho had de facto control of the entire business, which he ran very profitably, expanding into new markets and new trade goods until the family fortune was one of the greatest in Cairo. And when Acho died, the family sincerely mourned him and gave him an honorable funeral, for a slave.

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

That was when Tagiri left her backward search through her own family's past and took on what she thought would be her lifelong project: slavery. Till now, all the story-seekers in Pastwatch had devoted their careers to recording the stories of great, or at least influential, men and women of the past. But Tagiri would study the slaves, not the owners; she would search throughout history, not to record the choices of the powerful, but to find the stories of those who had lost all choice. To remember the forgotten people, the ones whose dreams were murdered and whose bodies were stolen from themselves, so that they were not even featured players in their own autobiographies. The ones whose faces showed that they never forgot for one instant that they did not belong to themselves, and that there was no lasting joy possible in life because of that.

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

Tagiri was thirty years old, some eight years into her slavery project, with a dozen of the more traditional pattern-seeking pastwatchers working under her alongside two of the story-seekers, when her career took its fmal turn, leading her at last to Columbus and the unmaking of history. Though she never left Juba, the town where her Pastwatch observatory was located, the Tempoview could range anywhere