Cristoforo watched from his palace as eight hundred Caribian ships set sail for the new world, carrying his first two sons on their different missions there. He watched as another hundred and fifty ships set forth in groups of three or four or five to carry ambassadors and traders to every port of Europe and to every city of the Muslims. He watched as ambassadors and princes, great traders and scholars and churchmen came to Ciudad Isabella to teach the Caribians and learn from them.
Surely God had fulfilled the promises made on that beach near Lagos. Because of Cristoforo the word of God was being carried to millions. Kingdoms had fallen at his feet, and the wealth that had passed through his hands, under his control, was beyond anything he could have conceived of as a child in Genova. The weaver’s son who had once cowered in fear at the cruel doings of great men had become one of the greatest of all, and had done it without cruelty. On his knees Cristoforo gave thanks many times for God’s goodness to him.
But in the silence of the night, on his balcony overlooking the sea, he thought back to his neglected wife Felipa; to his patient lover Beatrice in Córdoba; to Lady Beatrice de Bobadilla, who had died before he could return to her in triumph in Gomera. He thought back to his brothers and sisters in Genova, who were all in the grave before his fame could ever reach them. He thought of the years he might have spent with Diego, with Fernando, if he had never left Spain. Is there no triumph without loss, without pain, without regret?
He thought then of Diko. She could never have been the woman of his dreams; there were times when he suspected that she had once loved another man, too, that was as lost to her as both his Beatrices were to him. Diko had been his teacher, his partner, his lover, his companion, the mother of many children, his true queen when they had shaped a great kingdom out of a thousand villages on fifty islands and two continents. He loved her. He was grateful to her. She had been a gift of God to him.
Was it so disloyal of him, then, to wish for one hour’s conversation with Beatrice de Bobadilla? To wish that he could kiss Beatrice de Córdoba again, and hear her laugh loudly at his stories? To wish that he could show his charts and logbooks to Felipa, so she would know that his mad obsession had been worth the pain it caused to all of them?
There is no good thing that does not cost a dear price. That is what Cristoforo learned by looking back upon his life. Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price. That is what you gave me, Lord.
Pedro de Salcedo and his wife, Chipa, reached Ciudad Isabella in the fall of 1522, bringing letters to Colón from his daughter, his son-in-law, and, most important, from his Diko. They found the old man napping on his balcony, the smell of the sea strong in the rising breeze that promised rain from the west. Pedro was loath to wake him, but Chipa insisted that he wouldn’t want to wait. When Pedro shook him gently, Colón recognized them at once. “Pedro,” he murmured. “Chipa.”
“Letters,” Pedro said. “From Diko, most of all.”
Colón smiled, took the letters, and laid them unopened in his lap. He closed his eyes again, and it seemed he meant to doze off again. Pedro and Chipa lingered, watching him, with affection, with nostalgia for early days and great achievements. Then, suddenly, he seemed to rouse from his slumber. His eyes flew open and he raised one hand, his finger pointing out to sea. “Constantinople!” he cried.
Then he fell back in his chair, and his hand dropped into his lap. What dream was this? they wondered.
A few moments later, Pedro realized that there was a different quality to the old man’s posture now. Ah, yes, that’s the difference: He isn’t breathing now. He bent down and kissed his forehead. “Good-bye, my Captain-General,” he said. Chipa also kissed his white hair. “Go to God, my friend,” she murmured. Then they left to tell the palace staff that the great discoverer was dead.
_____
Epilogue
In the year 1955, a Caribian archaeologist, heading dig near the traditional location of the landing place of Cristóbal Colón, observed that the nearly perfect skull found that day was heavier than it should be. He noted the anomaly, and a few weeks later, when he had occasion to return to the University of Ankuash, he had it x-rayed. It showed a metal plate embedded inside the skull.
Inside the skull? Impossible. Only upon close examination did he find the hairline marks of surgery that had made the metal implant possible. But bones did not heal this neatly. What kind of surgery was this, to leave so little damage? It was not possible in 1955, let alone in the late fifteenth century, to do a job like this.
Photographing every step of the process, and with several assistants as witness, he sawed open the skull and removed the plate. It was of an alloy he had never seen before; later testing would reveal that it was an alloy that had never existed, to anyone’s knowledge. But the metal was hardly the issue. For once it was detached from the skull, it was found that the metal separated into four thin leaves, on which there was a great deal of writing—all of it almost microscopically small. It was written in four languages—Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. It was full of circumlocutions, for it was speaking of concepts which could not be readily expressed in the vocabulary available in any of those languages in 1500. But the message, once deciphered, was clear enough. It told which radio frequency to broadcast on, and in what pattern, in order to trigger a response from a buried archive.
The broadcast was made. The archive was found. The story it told was incredible and yet could not be doubted, for the archive itself was clearly the product of a technology that had never existed on Earth. When the story became clear, a search was made for two other archives. Together, they told a detailed history, not only of the centuries and millennia of human life before 1492, but also of a strange and terrifying history that had not happened, of the years between 1492 and the making of the archives. If there had been any doubt before about the authenticity of the find, all was dispelled when digs at the locations specified in the archives led to spectacular archaeological finds confirming everything that could be confirmed.
Had there once been a different history? No, two different histories, both of them obliterated by interventions in the past?
Suddenly the legends and rumors about Colón’s wife Diko and Yax’s mentor One-Hunahpu began to make sense. The more-obscure stories of a Turk who supposedly sabotaged the Pinta and was killed by Colón’s crew were revived and compared to the plans talked about in the archives. Obviously, the travelers had succeeded in journeying into their past, all three of them. Obviously they had succeeded.
Two of the travelers already had tombs and monuments. All that was left was to build a third tomb there on the Haitian shore, lay the skull within it, and inscribe on the outside the name Kemal, a date of birth that would not come for centuries, and as the date of death, 1492.
_____
Sources
Michael F. Brown, Tsewa’s Gift: Magic and Meaning in an Amazonian Society (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985). Though the culture studied by Brown is not directly related to any known people of the Caribbean, I found his exploration of magic use very helpful; it was for the sake of using this magic culture that I made the village of Ankuash a remnant of a pre-Taino tribe, which could well have had common roots with the tribe Brown studied in the upper amazon.
Geoffrey W. Conrad and Arthur A. Demarest, Religion and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1984). A remarkably perceptive book that stresses the role of religion and ideology in the creation of the two great American empires that the Europeans discovered—and conquered—in the sixteenth century. Not only are their ideas perceptive and often quite convincing, but also they are exemplars of rational perspective: They don’t think their ideas explain “everything,” as far too many do. They merely think their ideas explain something, and that other explanations that don’t include religion and ideology are inadequate, which seems obvious enough despite the fact that religion and ideology are often ignored or downplayed by historians, journalist
s, archaeologists, and even cultural anthropologists, who should know better.
Gianni Granzotto, Christopher Columbus (University of Oklahoma Press, 1985; trans. Stephen Sartarelli). The best-written and most balanced and helpful of the biographies of Columbus that I read. Granzotto neither judged Columbus by the ethics of our day nor idolized him; what emerged from his book was the best glimpse of the living man possible from documents and speculation alone.
Francine Jacobs, The Tainos: The People Who Welcomed Columbus (Putnam, 1992). It took a young-adult novel, published long after I should have turned in my own book for publication, to provide me with the details of the daily life and tribal politics of the people of Hispaniola. The writing is not scholarly, of course, but the information is valuable, and even though my project was undoing the events chronicled by Jacobs, I recommend this book highly for those who want to know what really happened in our version of history.
Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus (Knopf, 1991). If I had turned this novel in on time, I would have had to do it without the help of this excellent overview of Native American cultures. Besides helping with specific details concerning the long-lost tribes of the Caribbean islands, it gave me a good grounding in the sorts of generalities that Pastwatch might be bandying about—though the conclusions reached by characters concerning the cultures of the Americas are either mine or the characters’ own; if there are errors, Josephy and his contributors are responsible only for the fact that I was not even more mistaken.
Linda Scheie and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (Morrow, 1990). A friend of mine, Dave Dollahite, thrust this book upon me even though I insisted that I was working with the Mexica, not the Maya. He was wiser than I. The Mexica were keenly aware of their cultural dependence on the Toltecs and, before them, on the Maya, and this excellent book served me as a guide into the Mesoamerican mindset. The authors are rigorously scholarly without being needlessly obscure, and their loyalty to Maya culture makes their book in some ways a view from the inside. The authors’ determination to be nonjudgmental sometimes goes too far, as they occasionally slip from their morally neutral view of the culture of sacrifice to one that seems apologetic and even, occasionally, admiring. When the suffering of the victims of torture and sacrifice is merely “unfortunate” one realizes that there is such a thing as getting too much moral distance from one’s subject matter. Nevertheless, even this trait made A Forest of Kings all the more valuable to me: Watching how contemporary American scientists were able to become comfortable with a culture of sacrifice helped me see how the Mesoamericans themselves could accept it.
Dennis Tedlock, trans., Popul Vuh (Simon & Schuster, 1985). A fluid, clear translation of the Maya holy book, a truly alien mythology. I found this book invaluable in helping me get and give a feel for the culture and mindset of the Mesoamerican people at the time of the coming of the Spanish. The story of Hunahpu One and Seven and their sons is derived entirely from this text; I only regret that I could not include more of it.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (Harper & Row, 1984; French edition 1982; trans. Richard Howard). This was the book that made me want to write a novel about Columbus. Todorov’s analysis of the conflicting cultures, the mindsets on both sides that led to the European conquest of America—and most particularly his view of Columbus, Cortés, and Moctezuma—rang true with me and illuminated much that had been mysterious to me in the American past. This is not only a profound essay on cultures in conflict, but also a textbook on how to think about the public mind.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PASTWATCH: THE REDEMPTION OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Copyright © 1996 by Orson Scott Card
All rights reserved.
This novel includes a summary of the novella “Atlantis,” copyright © 1992, published in Grails: Quests, Visitations and Occurrences, ed. by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg and Edward E. Kramer.
A Tor Book
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ISBN-: 978-1-4299-6619-1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-44927
First Edition: February 1996
First Mass Market Edition: February 1997
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Pastwatch Page 38
