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.

Tagiri found her own solution -- the minority solution, but those who observed her were not surprised that she was one of those who took this route. Where most pastwatchers began to resort to statistical approaches to their research, keeping counts of different behaviors and then writing papers on cultural patterns, Tagiri took quite the opposite route, beginning to follow one individual from the beginning to the end of life. She wasn't looking for patterns. She was looking for stories. Ah, said her observers. She will be a biographer; it is lives, not cultures, that she will find for us.

Then her research took a twist that her superiors had seen only a few times before. Tagiri had already worked her way seven generations deep into her mother's family when she abandoned the biographical approach and, instead of following each person from birth to death, she began to follow individual women backward, from death to birth.