"You say that, Cristobal, only because you know that I'll say no."
He protested, but in his heart he knew that she was right. He had promised Felipa that Diego would be his only heir, and so he could hardly marry Beatrice and make her child legitimate. Beyond that, though, was the reasoning that she always used, and it was correct.
She recited it even now. "You can't be burdened with a wife and child when the court moves to Salamanca in the spring. Besides which, right now you come before the court as a gentleman who consorted with nobility and royalty in Portugal. You are the widower of a woman of high birth. But marry me, and what are you? The husband of the cousin of Genovese merchants. That does not make you a gentleman. I think the Marquise de Moya wouldn't be as taken with you then, either."
Ah, yes, his other "affair of the heart," Isabella's good friend the Marquise. In vain had he explained to Beatrice that Isabella was so pious that she would not tolerate any hint that Columbus had dallied with her friend. Beatrice was convinced that Columbus slept with her regularly; she pretended elaborately that she didn't mind. "The Marquise de Moya is a friend and a help to me, because she has the ear of the Queen and because she believes in my cause," said Columbus. "But the only thing that I find beautiful about her is her name."
"De Moya?" teased Beatrice.
"Her Christian name," said Columbus. "Beatrice, just like you. When I hear that name spoken, it fills me with love, but only for you. He rested his hand on her belly. "I'm sorry to have burdened you like this."
"Your child is no burden to me, Cristobal."
"I can never make him legitimate. If I win titles and fortune, they'll belong to Felipa's son Diego."
"He will have the blood of Columbus in him, and he will have my love and the love you gave me as his heritage."
"Beatrice," said Columbus, "what if I fail? What if there is no voyage, and therefore no fortune and no titles? What is your baby then? The bastard son of a Genovese adventurer who tried to involve the crowned heads of Europe in a mad scheme to sail into the unknown quarters of the sea."
"But you won't fail," she said, comfortably nestling closer to him. "God is with you."
Is he? thought Columbus. Or when I succumbed to your passion and joined you on your bed, did that sin -- which I haven't the strength even now to forsake -- deprive me of God's favor? Should I repudiate you now and repent of loving you, in order to win his favor back? Or should I forsake my oath to Felipa and follow the dangerous course of marrying you?
"God is with you," she said again. "God gave me to you. Marriage you must forsake for the sake of your great mission, but surely God does not mean you to be a priest, celibate and unloved."
She had always talked this way, even at the start, so that at first he had wondered if God had given him at last someone to whom he could talk about his vision on the beach near Lagos. But no, she knew nothing of that. And yet her faith in the divine origin of his mission was strong, and sustained him when he was at his most discouraged.
"You must eat," she said. "You have to keep up your strength for your jousting with the priests."
She was right, and he was hungry. But first he kissed her, because he knew that she needed to believe that she mattered more to him than anything, more than food, more than his cause. And as they kissed he thought, If only I had been this careful of Felipa. If only I had spent the little time it would have taken to reassure her, she might not have despaired and died so young, or if she died anyway, her life would have been happier until that day. It would have been so easy, but I didn't know.
Is that what Beatrice is? My chance to amend my mistakes with Felipa? Or simply a way to make new ones?
Never mind. If God wanted to punish Columbus for his illegitimate coupling with Beatrice, then so be it. But if God still wanted him to pursue his mission to the west, despite his sins and his weaknesses, then Columbus would keep trying with all his strength to accomplish it. His sins were no worse than King Solomon's, and a far sight gentler than King David's, and God gave greatness to both of them.
Dinner was delicious, and then they played together on the bed, and then he slept. It was the only happiness in these dark cold days, and whether God approved or not, he was glad of it.
* * *
Tagiri brought Hunahpu into the Columbus project, putting him and Diko jointly in charge of developing a plan of action for intervention in the past. For an hour or two, Hunahpu felt vindicated; he longed to go back to his old position just long enough to say good-bye, seeing the envy on the faces of those who had despised his private project -- a project that now would form the basis of the great Kemal's own work. But the glow of triumph soon passed, and then came dread: He would have to work among people who were used to a very high level of thought, of analysis. He would have to supervise people -- he who had always been impossible to supervise. How could he possibly measure up? They would all find him lacking, those above him and those below.
Diko was the one who brought him through these first days, being careful not to take over, but instead making sure that all decisions were jointly reached; that anytime he needed her advice even to know what the choices were, she prompted him only privately, where no one could see, so that the others wouldn't come to think of her as the "real" head of the intervention team. And soon enough Hunahpu began to feel more confident, and then the two of them really did lead together, often arguing over various points but never making a decision until both agreed. No one but Hunahpu and Diko themselves could have been surprised when, after several months together, each came to realize that their professional interdependence had turned to something much more intense and much more personal.
It was maddening to Hunahpu, that he worked with Diko every day, that every day he grew more sure that she loved him as much as he loved her, and yet she refused any hint, any proposal, any outright plea that they extend their friendship beyond the corridors of Pastwatch and into one of the grass huts of Juba.
"Why not?" he said. "Why not?"
"I'm tired," she said. "We have too much to do."
Normally he let this sort of answer stop him, but not today, not this time. "Everything is running smoothly in our project," he said. "We work together perfectly, and the team we've assembled is reliable and efficient. We go home every night at a reasonable hour. There is time, if only you took it, for us to -- to eat a meal together. To sit and talk as a man and a woman."
"There is no time for that," she said.
"Why?" he demanded. "We're close to ready, our project is. Kemal is still puttering along with his report on probable futures, and the machine is nowhere near done. We have plenty of time."
The distress on her face usually would be enough to silence him, but not now. "This doesn't have to make you unhappy," he said. "Your mother and father work together just as we do, and yet they married and had a child."
"Yes," she said. "But we will not."
"Why not! What is it, that I'm so much smaller than you? I can't help the fact that Maya people are shorter than a Turko-Dongotona."
"You are so stupid, Hunahpu," she said. "Father is shorter than Mother, too. What kind of idiot do you think I am?"
"Such an idiot that you're in love with me just as I'm in love with you, only for some insane reason you refuse to admit it, you refuse even to take a chance on us being happy together."
To his surprise, tears came to her eyes. "I don't want to talk about this," she said.
"But I do," he said.
"You think you love me," she said.
"I know I love you."
"And you think I love you," she said.
"I hope for that."
"And maybe you're right," she said. "But there's something that both of us love more.
"What?"
"This," she said, indicating the room around them, filled with TruSite IIs and Tempoviews and computers and desks and chairs.
"People in Pastwatch love and live as human beings," he answered.
"Not Pastwat
ch, Hunahpu, our project. The Columbus project. We're going to succeed. We're going to assemble our team of three who will go back in time. And when they succeed, all of this will cease to be. Why should we marry and bring a child into the world in order to cause it to disappear in only a few more years?"
"We don't know that," said Hunahpu. "The mathematicians are still divided. Maybe all we create by intervening in the past is a fork in time, so that both futures continue to exist."
"You know that that is the least likely alternative. You know that the machine is being built according to the theory of metatime. Anything sent back in time is lifted out of the causal flow. It can no longer be affected by anything that happens to the timestream that originally brought it into existence, and when it enters the timestream at a different point, it becomes an uncaused causer. When we change the past, this present will disappear."
"Both theories can explain the way the machine works," said Hunahpu, "so don't try to use your superior education in mathematics and time theory against me."
"It doesn't matter anyway," said Diko. "Because even if our time continues to exist, I won't be in it."
There it was -- the unspoken assumption that she would be one of the three who went back in time.
"That's ludicrous," he said. "A tall black woman, going to live among the Taino?"
"A tall black woman with a detailed knowledge of events that still lie in the future for the people of the surrounding tribes," she said. "I think I'll do well enough."
"Your parents will never let you go."
"My parents will do whatever it takes for this mission to succeed," she answered. "I'm already far more qualified than anyone else. I'm in perfect health. I've been studying the languages I'll need for that aspect of the project -- Spanish, Genovese, Latin, two Arawak dialects, one Carib dialect, and the Ciboney language that is still used in Putukam's village because they think it's so holy. Who else can match that? And I know the plan, inside and out, and all the thinking that went into it. Who can do better than I to adapt the plan if things don't go as expected? So I will go, Hunahpu. Mother and Father will fight it for a while, and then they'll realize that I am the best hope of success, and they'll send me."
He said nothing. He knew that it was true.
She laughed at him. "You hypocrite," she said. "You've been doing just what I've been doing -- you've designed the Mesoamerican part of the plan so that only you can possibly do it."
That too was true. "I'm as natural a choice as you are -- more natural, because I'm a Maya."
"A Maya who's more than a foot taller than the Mayas and Zapotecs of the period," she retorted.
"I speak two Mayan dialects, plus Nahuatl, Zapotec, Spanish, Portuguese, and both of the Tarascan dialects that matter. And all your arguments apply to me as well. Plus I know all the technologies we're going to try to introduce and the detailed personal histories of all the people we have to deal with. There is no choice but me."
"I know it," said Diko. "I knew it before you did. You don't have to persuade me."
"Oh," he said.
"You are a hypocrite," she said, and there was some emotion behind it. "You were all set to go yourself, and yet you expected me to stay behind. You had some foolish notion that we would marry and have a baby, and then I would stay behind on the off chance that there would be a future here while you went back and fulfilled your destiny."
"No," he said. "I never really thought of marriage."
"Then what, Hunahpu? Sneaking off to some sordid little rendezvous? I'm not your Beatrice, Hunahpu. I have work of my own to do. And unlike the Europeans and, apparently, the Indies, I know that to mate with someone without marriage is a repudiation of the community, a refusal to take one's proper role within the society. I won't mate like an animal, Hunahpu. When I marry it will be as a human being. And it will not be in this timestream. If I marry at all, it will be in the past, because that's the only place where I have a future."
He listened, leaden at heart. "The chance of our both living long enough to meet there is small, Diko."
"And that, my friend, is why I refuse all your invitations to extend our friendship beyond these walls. There's no future for us."
"Is the future, is the past, all that matters to you? Don't you have just a little bit of room for the present?"
Again the tears flowed down her cheeks. "No," she said.
He reached up and cleared her cheeks with his thumbs, then streaked his own cheeks with her tears. "I will love no one but you," he said.
"So you say now," she said. "But I release you from that promise and I forgive you already for the fact that you will love someone, and you will marry, and if we ever meet there, we will be friends and be glad to see each other and we will not regret for one moment that we did not act foolishly now."
"We will regret it, Diko. At least I will. I regret it now, and I will regret it then, and always. Because no one that we meet in the past will understand what and who we really are, not the way we understand each other now. No one in the past will have shared our goals or worked as hard to help us achieve them as we've done for each other. No one will know you and love you as I do. And even if you're right, and there's no future for us, I for one would rather face whatever future I do have with the memory of knowing that we had each other for a while."
"Then you are a romantic fool, just as Mother always said!"
"She said that?"
"Mother is never wrong," said Diko. "She also said that I would never have a better friend than you."
"She was right, then."
"Be my true friend, Hunahpu," said Diko. "Never speak of this to me again. Work with me, and when the time comes to go into the past, go with me. Let our marriage be the work we do together, and let our children be the future that we build. Let me come to whatever husband I do have without the memories of another husband or another lover to encumber me. Let me face my future with confidence in your friendship instead of guilt, whether it comes from denying you or accepting you. Will you do that for me?"
No, shouted Hunahpu silently. Because that isn't necessary, we don't have to do that, we can be happy now and still be happy in the future and you're wrong, completely wrong about this.
Except that if she believed that marriage or an affair would make her unhappy then it would make her unhappy, and so she was right -- for herself -- and loving him would be a bad thing -- for her. So ... did he love her or merely want to own her? Was it her happiness he cared about or satisfaction of his own needs?
"Yes," said Hunahpu. "I'll do that for you."
It was then, and only then, that she kissed him, leaned down to him and kissed him on the lips, not briefly but not with passion either. With love, simple love, a single kiss, and then she left, and left him desolate.
Chapter 8 -- Dark Futures
Father Talavera had listened to all the eloquent, methodical, sometimes impassioned arguments, but he had known from the start that he had to make the final decision about Colўn by himself. How many years had they listened to Colўn -- and harangued him, too -- so that all were weary of the same conversations endlessly repeated? For so many years, since the Queen first asked him to lead the examination of Colўn's claims, nothing had changed. Maldonado still seemed to regard Colўn's very existence as an affront, while Deza seemed almost infatuated with the Genovese. The others still lined up behind one or the other, or, like Talavera himself, remained neutral. Or rather, they seemed neutral. They merely wavered like grass, dancing in whatever wind was blowing. How many times had each one come to him privately and spent long minutes -- sometimes hours -- explaining their views, which always amounted to the same thing: They agreed with everybody.
I alone am truly neutral, thought Talavera. I alone am swayed by no argument whatsoever. I alone can listen to Maldonado bring forth sentences from ancient, long-forgotten writings in languages so obscure that quite possibly no one ever spoke them except the original writer himself -- I alone can listen to him and hear
only the voice of a man who is determined not to allow the slightest new idea to disrupt his own perfect understanding of the world. I alone can listen to Deza eloquizing about Colўn's brilliance in finding truths so long overlooked by scholars and hear only the voice of a man who yearned to be a knight-errant from the romances, championing a cause which is noble only because he champions it.
I alone am neutral, thought Talavera, because I alone understand the utter stupidity of the entire conversation. Which of these ancients they all quote with such certainty was lifted by the hand of God to see the Earth from an appropriate vantage point? Which of them was given calipers by the hand of God to make an accurate measurement of the diameter of the Earth? No one knew anything. The only serious attempt at measurement, more than a thousand years before, could have been disastrously flawed by the tiniest inconsistency in the original observations. All the argument in the world could not change the fact that if you build the foundation of your logic upon guesswork, then your conclusions will be guesswork also.
Of course Talavera could never say this to anyone else. He had not risen to his position of trust by freely expressing his skepticism about the wisdom of the ancients. On the contrary: All who knew him were sure that he was utterly orthodox. He had labored hard to make sure they had that opinion of him. And in a sense they were right. He simply defined orthodoxy quite differently from them.
Talavera did not put his faith in Aristotle or Ptolemy. He already knew what the examination of Colўn was demonstrating in such agonizing detail: that for every ancient authority there was a contradictory authority just as ancient and (he suspected) just as ignorant. Let the other scholars claim that God had whispered to Plato as he wrote the Symposium; Talavera knew better. Aristotle was clever but his wise sayings were no likelier to be true than the opinions of other clever men.
Talavera put his faith in only one person: Jesus Christ. His were the only words that Talavera cared about, Christ's cause the only cause that stirred his soul. Every other cause, every other idea, every other plan or party or faction or individual, was to be judged in light of how it would either help or hinder the cause of Christ. Talavera had realized early in his rise within the Church that the monarchs of Castile and Aragon were good for the cause of Christ, and so he enlisted himself in their camp. They found him to be a valuable servant because he was deft at marshaling the resources of the Church in their support.
Pastwatch: The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus Page 19
