"Perhaps," said Tagiri. "But I think they were doing something else. There was something else that would have happened if Columbus had not received this vision. And we must find out what it was."
"How can we find out what would have happened?" asked Diko.
Tagiri smiled nastily at Kemal. "I know one man of unflagging persistence and great wisdom and quick judgment. He is just the man to undertake the project of determining what it was that this vision was meant to avoid, or what it was meant to accomplish. For some reason the people of that other future determined to send Columbus west. Someone must head the project of finding out why. And you, Kemal, you're doing nothing productive at all, are you? Your great days are behind you, and now you're reduced to going about telling other people that their dreams are not worth accomplishing."
For a moment it seemed that Kemal might strike her, so cruel was her assessment of him. But he did not raise his hand, and after a long moment he turned and left the room.
"Is he right, Mother?" asked Diko.
"More to the point," said Hassan, "will he make trouble for us?"
"I think he'll head the project of finding out what would have happened," said Tagiri. "I think the problem will take hold of him and won't let go and he'll end up working with us."
"Oh good," murmured someone dryly, and they all laughed.
"Kemal as an enemy is formidable, but Kemal as a friend is irreplaceable," said Tagiri. "He found Atlantis, didn't he, when no one believed it even needed to be discovered? He found the great flood. He found Yewesweder. And if anyone can, he'll find what history would have been, or at least a plausible scenario. And we'll be glad to be working with him." She grinned. "We mad people, we're stubborn and unreasonable and impossible to deal with, but there is a certain breed of willing victim that chooses to work with us anyway."
The others laughed, but few of them thought that Kemal was anything like their beloved Tagiri.
"And I think we've all missed one of the biggest points of all in Diko's great discovery. Yes, Diko, great." Tagiri looked around at them. "Can't you see what it is?"
"Of course," said Hassan. "Seeing that little performance by actors pretending to be the Trinity lets us know one fact beyond doubting: We can reach back into the past. If they can send a vision, a deliberately controlled vision, then so can we."
"And maybe," said Tagiri, "maybe we can do better."
Chapter 6 -- Evidence
According to the Popul Vuh, the holy book of the Mayan people, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane gave birth to two sons, named One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu. One Hunahpu grew to be a man, and he married, and his wife, Xbaquiyalo, gave birth to two sons, One Monkey and One Artisan. Seven Hunahpu never grew up; before he could become a man he and his brother were sacrificed at the ball court when they lost to One and Seven Death. Then One Hunahpu's head was put in the crotch of a calabash tree, which had never before borne fruit. And when it did bear, the fruit looked like a head, and One Hunahpu's head came to look like the fruit, so they were the same.
Then a young virgin named Blood Woman came to the ball court of sacrifice to see the tree, and there she spoke to the head of One Hunahpu, and the head of One Hunahpu spoke to her. When she touched the bone of his head, his spittle came out onto her hand, and soon she conceived a child. Seven Hunahpu consented to this, and so he was also the father of what filled her belly.
Blood Woman refused to tell her father how the child came to be in her womb, since it was forbidden to go to the calabash tree where One Hunahpu's head had been perched. Disgusted that she had conceived a bastard, her father sent her away to be sacrificed. But to save her life, she told the Military Keepers of the Mat, who were sent to kill her, that the child in her came from One Hunahpu's head. Then they didn't want to kill her, but they had to bring her heart back to show her father, Blood Gatherer. So Blood Woman fooled her father by filling a bowl with the red sap of the croton tree, which congealed to look like a bloody heart. All the gods of Xibalba were fooled by her false heart.
Blood Woman went to the house of One Hunahpu's widow, Xbaquiyalo, to bear her child. When the child was born, it was two children, two sons, whom she named Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Xbaquiyalo didn't like the noise the babies made, and she had them thrown out of the house. Her sons, One Monkey and One Artisan, had no wish for new brothers, so they put them out on an anthill. When the babies didn't die there, the older brothers put them in brambles, but still they thrived. The hatred between the older brothers and the younger brothers continued through all the years as the babies grew to be men.
The older brothers were flutists, singers, artists, makers, and knowers. Above all, they were knowers. They knew when their brothers were born exactly who and what they were, and what they would become, but out of jealousy they told no one. So it was justice when Hunahpu and Xbalanque tricked them into climbing a tree and trapped them there, where the two older brothers turned into monkeys and never touched the ground again. Then Hunahpu and Xbalanque, great warriors and ball players, went to contest the quarrel between their fathers, One and Seven Hunahpu, and the gods of Xibalba.
At the end of the game, Xbalanque was forced to sacrifice his brother Hunahpu. He wrapped his brother's heart in a leaf, and then he danced alone in the ball court until he cried out his brother's name and Hunahpu rose up from the dead and took his place beside him. Seeing this, their two opponents in the game, the great lords One and Seven Death, demanded that they, too, be sacrificed. So Hunahpu and Xbalanque took the heart from One Death; but he didn't rise from the dead. Seeing this, Seven Death was terrified and begged to be released from his sacrifice. Thus, in shame, his heart was taken without courage and without consent. And this was how Hunahpu and Xbalanque avenged their fathers, One and Seven Hunahpu, and broke the great power of the lords of Xibalba.
Thus it says in the Popol Vuh.
When a third son was born to Dolores de Cristo Matamoro, she remembered her studies in Mayan culture when she was growing up back in Tekax in the Yucatan, and since she was unsure who the father of this child was, she named him for Hunahpu. If she had had yet another son, no doubt she would have named him Xbalanque, but instead when Hunahpu was still a toddler she was jostled off a platform in the station at San Andres Tuxtla and the train mangled her.
Hunahpu Matamoro had nothing of her, really, but the name she gave him, and perhaps that was what steered him into his obsession with the past of his people. His older brothers became normal men of San Andres Tuxtla: Pedro became a policeman and Josemaria became a priest. But Hunahpu studied the history of the Maya, of the Mexica, of the Toltecs, of the Zapotecs, of the Olmecs, the great nations of Mesoamerica, and when his test scores proved high enough on his second try, he was admitted to Pastwatch and began his studies in earnest.
This was his project from the beginning: to find out what would have happened in Mesoamerica if the Spanish had not come. Unlike Tagiri, whose file had a silver tag that meant her oddities were to be indulged, Hunahpu met resistance every step of the way. "Pastwatch watches the past," he was told again and again. "We don't speculate on what might have been if the past had not happened the way it happened. There's no way to test it, and it would have no value even if you got it right."
But despite the resistance, Hunahpu continued. No team of coworkers grew up around him. In fact he belonged to another team, one that was researching the Zapotecan cultures of the northern coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the years prior to the coming of the Spanish. He was assigned to this team because it was the legitimate project that came closest to Hunahpu's interest. His supervisors were well aware that he spent at least as much time on his speculative research as on the observations that would contribute to real knowledge. They were patient. They hoped he would grow out of his obsession with trying to know the unknowable, if they left him long enough. As long as his work on the Zapotec project remained adequate -- which it did, barely.
Then came the news of the discovery of the Intervention. A Pastwatch f
rom another future had sent a vision to Columbus, which turned him away from his dream of leading a crusade to liberate Constantinople and brought him, eventually, to America. It was astonishing; to an Indie like Hunahpu it was also appalling. How dared they! For he knew at once what it was that the Interveners had been trying to avoid, and it wasn't the Christian conquest of Islam.
Rumors began circulating a few weeks later, and repetition made them believable. The great Kemal was setting up a new project. For the first time, Pastwatch was trying to extrapolate from the past what would have happened in the future if a particular event hadn't happened. Why are they forming a project to study this, Hunahpu wondered. He knew that he could answer all of Kemal's questions in a moment. He knew that if anyone in Kemal's new project read a single paper he had written and posted on the nets, they would realize that the answer was right before them, the work was already laid out, it was just a matter of applying a few man-years to filling in the details.
Hunahpu waited for Kemal to write to him, or for one of the Pastwatch supervisors to recommend that Kemal look into Hunahpu's research, or even -- as must inevitably happen -- for Hunahpu's reassignment to Kemal's project. But the reassignment didn't come, the letter didn't come, and Hunahpu's superiors seemed not to realize that Kemal's most valuable assistant would be this sluggish young Maya who had worked dispiritedly on their tedious data gathering project.
That was when Hunahpu realized that it wasn't just the resistance of others that he faced: It was their disdain as well. His work was so despised that no one thought of it at all, no rumors of it had circulated, and when he looked into it he found out that none of the papers he had posted on the networks had been downloaded and read, not one, not once.
But it was not in Hunahpu's nature to despair. Instead he grimly redoubled his efforts, knowing that the only way to surmount the barrier of contempt was to produce a body of evidence so compelling that Kemal would be forced to respect it. And if he had to, Hunahpu would carry that evidence to Kemal directly, bypassing all the regular channels, the way that Kemal had come to Tagiri in that already-legendary meeting. Of course, there was a difference. Kemal had come as a famous man, with known achievements, so that he was courteously received even when his message was unwelcome. Hunahpu had no achievements whatsoever, or none that were recognized by anybody, and so it was unlikely that Kemal would ever agree to see him or look at his work. Yet this did not stop him. Hunahpu continued, patiently assembling evidence and writing careful analyses of what he had found and loathing every moment he had to spend recording the details of the building of seagoing ships among the coastal Zapotecs during the years from 1510 to 1524.
His older brothers, the policeman and the priest, who were not bastards and therefore always looked down on him, became worried about him. They came to see him at the Pastwatch station at San Andres Tuxtla, where Hunahpu was allowed to use a conference room to meet with them, since there was no privacy in his cubicle. "You're never home," the policeman said. "I call and you never answer."
"I'm working," said Hunahpu.
"You don't look healthy," said the priest. "And when we spoke to your supervisor about you, she said you weren't very productive. Always working on your own useless projects."
"You asked my supervisor about me?" asked Hunahpu. He wasn't sure whether to be annoyed at the intrusion or pleased that his brothers had cared enough to check up on him.
"Well, actually, she came to us," said the policeman, who always told the truth even when it was slightly embarrassing. "She wanted to see if we could encourage you to abandon your foolish obsession with the lost future of the Indies."
Hunahpu looked at them sadly. "I can't," he said.
"We didn't think so," said the priest. "But when you're dropped from Pastwatch, what will you do? What are you qualified for?"
"Don't think either of us has any money to help you," said the policeman. "Or even to feed you more than a few meals a week, though you're welcome to that much, for our mother's sake."
"Thank you," said Hunahpu. "You've helped me clarify my thinking."
They got up to leave. The policeman, who was older and hadn't beaten him up as a child half so often as the priest, stopped in the doorway. His face was tinged with regret. "You aren't going to change a thing, are you?" he said.
"Yes, I am," said Hunahpu. "I'm going to hurry and finish sooner. Before I'm dropped from Pastwatch."
The policeman shook his head. "Why do you have to be so ... Indie?"
Hunahpu didn't understand the question for a moment. "Because I am."
"So are we, Hunahpu."
"You? Josemaria and Pedro?"
"So our names are Spanish."
"And your veins are thinned with Spanish blood, and you live with Spanish jobs in Spanish cities."
"Thinned?" asked the policeman. "Our veins are--"
"Whoever my father was, " said Hunahpu, "he was Maya, like Mother."
The policeman's face darkened. "I see that you wish not to be my brother."
"I'm proud to be your brother," said Hunahpu, dismayed at the way his words had been taken. "I have no quarrel with you. But I also have to know what my people -- our people -- would have been without the Spanish."
The priest reappeared in the doorway behind the policeman. "They would have been bloody-handed human sacrificers, torturers, and self-mutilators who never heard the name of Christ."
"Thank you for caring enough to come to me," said Hunahpu. "I'll be fine."
"Come to my house for dinner," said the policeman.
"Thank you. Another day I will."
His brothers left, and Hunahpu turned to his computer and addressed a message to Kemal. There was no chance that Kemal would read it -- there were too many thousands of people on the Pastwatch net for a man like Kemal to pay attention to what would end up as a third-tier message from an obscure data-collector on the Zapotec project. Yet he had to get through, somehow, or his work would come to nothing. So he wrote the most provocative message he could think of, and then sent it to everybody involved in the whole Columbus project, hoping that one of them would glance at third-tier e-mail and be intrigued enough to bring his words to the attention of Kemal.
This was his message:
Kemal: Columbus was chosen because he was the greatest man of his age, the one who broke the back of Islam. He was sent westward in order to prevent the worst calamity in all of human history: The Tlaxcalan conquest of Europe. I can prove it. My public papers have been posted and ignored, as surely as yours would have been if you had not found evidence of Atlantis in the old TruSite I weather recordings. There are no recordings of the Tlaxcalan conquest of Europe, but the proof is still there. Talk to me and save yourself years of work. Ignore me and I will go away.
-- Hunahpu Matamoros
* * *
Columbus was not proud of the reason he had married Felipa. He had known from the moment he arrived that as a foreign merchant in Lisbon he would get no closer to his goal. There was a colony of Genovese merchants in Lisbon, and Columbus immediately became involved in their traffic. In the winter of 1476 he joined a convoy that sailed north to Flanders, to England, and on to Iceland. It was less than a year since he had set out on a similar voyage fall of high hopes and expectations; now that he actually found himself in those ports, he could hardly concentrate on the business that brought him there. What good was it for him to be involved in the merchant trade among the cities of Europe? God had a higher work for him to do. The result was that, while he made some money on these voyages, he did not distinguish himself. Only in Iceland, where he heard sailors' tales of lands not all that far to the west that had once held flourishing colonies of Northmen, did he learn anything that seemed useful to him, but even then, he could not help but remember that God had told him to use a southern route for sailing west, and only return in the north. These lands the Icelanders knew of were not the great kingdoms of the east, that much was obvious.
Somehow he had to put toge
ther an expedition to explore the ocean to the west. Several of his trading voyages took him to the Azores and Madeira -- the Portuguese would never let a foreigner go beyond that point, into African waters, but they were welcome to come to Madeira to buy African gold and ivory, or to the Azores to take on supplies at highly inflated prices. Columbus knew from his contacts in those places that great expeditions passed through Madeira every few months, bound for Africa. Columbus knew that Africa led nowhere useful -- but he coveted the fleets. Somehow he had to win command of one of them, bound westward instead of southward. And yet what hope did he have of ever achieving this?
At least in Genova his father had ties of loyalty to the Fieschi, which had been an exploitable connection. In Portugal, all navigation, all expeditions were under the direct control of the king. The only way to get ships and sailors and funding for a voyage of exploration was by appealing to the king, and as a Genovese and a commoner there was scant hope of this.
Since he had been born with no family connections in Portugal, there was only one way to acquire them. And marriage into a well-connected family, when he had neither fortune nor prospects, was a difficult project indeed. He needed a family on the fringes of nobility, and one that was not on the way up. A rising family would be looking to improve its station by marrying above themselves; a sinking family, especially a junior branch with unlikely daughters and little fortune, might look upon such a foreign adventurer as Columbus with -- well, not favor, exactly, but at least tolerance. Or perhaps resignation.
Whether because of his near death in the ocean or because God wished him to have a more distinguished appearance, Columbus found his red hair rapidly turning white. Since he was still youthful in the face and vigorous in the body, the whitening hair turned many heads his way. Whenever he wasn't voyaging on business, attempting to make headway in a trade that was always tilted in favor of the native Portuguese, he made it a point to attend All Saints' Church, where the marriageable ladies of families not rich enough to have their own household priest in attendance were brought forth, heavily supervised, to hear mass, take communion, and make confession.
Pastwatch: The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus Page 12
