Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,15

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 Putukain 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 arty 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,