This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

Will the people of Tawantinsuyu brave the ocean their murderers will one day call the Pacific, and, finding the swift currents, travel to the Philippines, or even farther, as others have traveled before? Will they, crossing waters so unfished that all a woman need do to eat is dart her hand beneath the waves and pull the fish up wriggling and silver, find new civilizations and make conquest, or common cause? Will this alliance and trade, stretched across the Pacific, save Tawantinsuyu when Pizarro’s grotesque sails belly up from the south? Will, at the least, early contact with Eurasian plagues strengthen these people against them? Or: Will the tradesmen make it so far as a China ruled by the Ming, soon to reel from an enormous currency crisis that will bring the empire to its knees—a currency crisis brought on by the shifting exchange rate between copper cash and silver, of which the people of Tawantinsuyu sport an ample supply? Stabilized, will the Ming duck the four-century cycle of empires’ rise and fall, and endure, growing, transforming, expanding to keep pace with the West’s slow Enlightenment and its overweening Industrial Revolution?