It is how we all should feel, for we all are being killed this day, by these machines. Kemal feels in his heart that he will die first, but it is not so. Of all the people in the world on this day, in this hour, he will be one of only three who do not die when the switch is thrown and the cargo and passengers of these hollow hemispheres hurtle back in time. Only two people alive today have a future longer than Kemal's.
And yet it was not wrong of him to relish his death. He would die surrounded by hate and rage, killed by those who did not understand what he was doing, but their hate would be a kind of honor, their rage a fitting response to his achievement.
Sa was nearly finished. "From the serious to the banal," he said. "Keep all your body parts inside the sphere. Don't stand up, don't raise your hands until you can see that you have arrived."
He pointed at the wires and cables dangling from the ceiling directly over the center of each hemisphere. "Those cables that hold up the field generators will be severed by the successful generation of the field. Thus your separation from the flow of time will have almost no duration. The field will exist, and in the moment it comes to exist, the generator will lose all power and the field will cease to exist. You'll be aware of none of that, of course. The only thing you will know is that the generator will suddenly drop. Since no part of your body will be under the generator -- I'm hoping you will not risk breaking an ankle by testing whether I'm right or not ..."
Diko laughed nervously. Hunahpu and Kemal were impassive. "You will be in no danger from the fall of the generator. However, it will whip the cables down with it. They are heavy, but fortunately the fall is short and there won't be that much force in them. Still, you must be aware of the possibility of being struck with some violence by the cable. So even though you may wish to strike some gallant pose, I must beg you to assume a covered, protected position so that you do not jeopardize the success of your mission by exposing yourself to the risk of personal injury."
"Yes yes," said Kemal. "We will curl up like infants in the uterus."
"Then we're done here. Time to go."
There was only a moment's hesitation. And then the last goodbyes began. Almost in silence, Hunahpu was embraced by his brothers, and Hassan and Tagiri, and their son Acho, held and kissed Diko for the last time. Kemal stood alone until Tagiri came also to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek, and Hassan gripped his shoulders and murmured something to him, words from the Quran, and then kissed him on the lips.
Kemal climbed alone into his hemisphere. Hunahpu walked with Diko to hers, and just before she climbed the ladder he embraced her and kissed her gently. Tagiri did not hear the words that passed between them, but she knew -- they all knew, but did not speak of it -- that Hunahpu and Diko had also made a personal sacrifice, perhaps not as complete as that of Kemal, but one with its own kind of pain, its own sweet bitterness. It was possible that Kemal and Diko might see each other again, for they were both going to the island of Hispaniola -- no, the island of Haiti, for it was the native name for it that would survive now. But Hunahpu was going to the swamps of Chiapas in Mexico, and it was quite likely that either he or Diko would die during the long years before their paths could cross.
And that was assuming that all three hemispheres would arrive. The problem of simultaneity had never been overcome. Even though the wiring had been carefully measured so that it should take exactly as long for the signal to go from the switch to the three computers and from the computers to the three field generators, they knew that no amount of careful measurement could possibly make the signals arrive with true simultaneity. There would be some tiny but real difference in time. One of the signals would arrive first. One of the fields would exist, even if it was for just one nanosecond, before the others came into existence. And it was possible that because of the changes caused by the first field, the other fields would never come into being at all. The future in which they existed would have been obliterated.
Thus it was determined that each of the three must act as if the other two had already failed. Each must carry out the mission with as much care as if everything depended on him or her alone, for it very well might be true.
But they hoped that all three time machines would work, that all three travelers would reach their separate destinations. Diko would arrive in Haiti in 1488, Kemal in 1492; Hunahpu would reach Chiapas in 1475. "There is a certain sloppiness in nature," Manjam had told them. "True precision is never achieved, is never even possible, and so everything that happens depends on a certain amount of probability, has a little leeway, a bit of room to compensate for lapses and mistakes. Genetic molecules are filled with redundancy and can cope with a certain amount of loss or damage or extra insertions. Electrons moving through their quantum shells have a certain range of unpredictability about their exact location, for all that matters is that they remain at the same distance from the nucleus. Planets wobble in their orbits and yet persist for billions of years without falling into their motherstars. So there should be room for microseconds or milliseconds or centiseconds or even deciseconds of difference between the beginnings of the three fields. But we have no way of experimenting to see just what the tolerances are. We may have far exceeded them. We may have missed by a fraction of a nanosecond. We may have been so far from success as to have made this whole venture wasted time. Who can know these things?"
Why is it, thought Tagiri, that even though I know that within a few minutes I and my dear husband and my precious son Acho will almost certainly wink out of existence, it is Diko that I am grieving for? She is the one who will live. She is the one with the future. Yet the animal part of me, the part that feels emotion, does not comprehend my own death. It is not death, when the whole world dies with you. No, the animal part of me only knows that my child is leaving me, and that is what I grieve for.
She watched as Hunahpu helped Diko up the ladder, then walked to his own hemisphere and climbed.
And now it was Tagiri's own turn. She kissed and embraced Hassan and Acho, and then climbed her own ladder, up to the locked cage. She pressed the button to open it as Manjam and Hassan also pressed their widely separated buttons, as Diko and Hunahpu and Kemal pressed the buttons on their field generators. The lock clicked and she pushed open the door of the cage and stepped inside.
"I'm in," she said. "Release your buttons, travelers."
"Get in position," called Sd.
Tagiri was now above the hemispheres and could see as Kemal and Diko and Hunahpu curled up on top of their equipment and supplies, making sure that no part of their bodies was under the field generator or extending beyond the boundaries of the sphere that the field generator would create.
"Are you ready?" called Sa.
"Yes," answered Kemal at once.
"Ready," said Hunahpu.
"I'm ready," said Diko.
"Can you see them?" called Sa, now talking to Tagiri and to the other three watchers who were in position to see. All of them confirmed that the travelers seemed to be in a good position.
"When you are ready, Tagiri," said Sd.
Tagiri hesitated only a moment. I am killing everyone so that everyone can live, she reminded herself. They chose this, as much as anyone with imperfect understanding can ever choose. From birth we all were fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place. This litany of justification passed quickly, and again she was left with the pain that had gnawed at her for the weeks, the years of this project.
For a fleeting moment she wished that she had never joined Pastwatch, rather than to face this moment, to have it be her hand that pulled the switch.
Who else's hand? she asked herself. Who else should bear this responsibility, if I cannot bear it? All the slaves waited for her to bring them freedom. All the unborn children of countless generations of humanity waited for her to save them from the withering death of the world. Diko waited for her to send her out into the great work of
her life. She grasped the handle of the switch. "I love you," she said. "I love you all."
She pulled it down.
Chapter 10 -- Arrivals
Did the Lord say that Cristoforo would be the first to see the new land? If he did, then the prophecy must be fulfilled. But if he did not, then Cristoforo could allow Rodrigo de Triana to claim credit for seeing land first. Why couldn't Cristoforo remember the exact words the Lord said? The most important moment in his life until now, and the wording escaped him completely.
No mistaking it, though. In the moonlight seeping through the clouds everyone could see the land; sharp-eyed Rodrigo de Triana had first seen it an hour ago, at two in the morning, when it was nothing but a different-colored shadow on the western horizon. The other sailors were gathered around him now, offering their congratulations and cheerfully reminding him of his debts, both real and imaginary. As well they should, for the first to see land had been promised a reward of ten thousand maravedis a year for life. It was enough to keep a fine household with servants; it would make de Triana a gentleman.
But what was it, then, that Cristoforo had seen earlier tonight, at ten o'clock? Land must have been close then, too, scarcely four hours before de Triana saw it. Cristoforo had seen a light, moving up and down, as if signaling him, as if beckoning him onward. God had shown land to him, and if he was to fulfill the words of the Lord, he must lay the claim.
"I'm sorry, Rodrigo," called Cristoforo from his place near the helm. "But the land you see now is surely the same land I saw at ten o'clock."
A hush fell over the company.
"Don Pedro Gutierrez came to my side when I called him," said Cristoforo. "Don Pedro, what did we both see?"
"A light," said Don Pedro. "In the west, where the land now lies." He was the King's majordomo -- or, to put it bluntly, the King's spy. Everyone knew he was no particular friend to Colўn. Yet to the common sailors, all gentlemen were conspirators against them, as it certainly seemed to them now.
"I was the one cried 'land' before anyone," said de Triana. "You gave no sign of it, Don Cristobal."
"I admit that I doubted it," said Cristoforo. "The sea was rough, and I doubted that land could be so near. I convinced myself that it could not be land, and so I said nothing because I didn't want to raise false hopes. But Don Pedro is my witness that I did see it, and what we all see now bears out the truth of it."
De Triana was outraged at what seemed to him to be plain theft. "All those hours I strained my eyes looking west. A light in the sky isn't land. No one saw land before I did, no one!"
Sdnchez, the royal inspector -- the King's official representative and bookkeeper on the voyage -- immediately spoke up, his voice whipping sharply across the deck. "Enough of this. On the King's voyage, does anyone dare to question the word of the King's admiral?"
It was a daring thing for him to say, for only if Cristoforo reached Cipangu and returned to Spain would the title Admiral of the Ocean-Sea belong to him. And Cristoforo well knew that last night, when Don Pedro had affirmed that he saw the same light, Sdnchez had insisted that there was no light, that there was nothing in the west. If anyone was going to cast doubt on Cristoforo's claim to first sighting, it would be Sanchez. Yet he had supported, if not Cristoforo's testimony, then his authority.
That would do well enough.
"Rodrigo, your eyes are indeed sharp, " said Cristoforo. "If someone on shore had not been casting a light -- a torch, or a bonfire -- I would have seen nothing. But God led my eyes to the shore by that light, and you merely confirmed what God had already shown me."
The men were silent, but Cristoforo knew that they were not content. A moment ago they had been rejoicing in the sudden enrichment of one of their own; as usual, they had seen the reward snatched out of the hands of the common man. They would assume, of course, that Cristoforo and Don Pedro lied, that they acted from greed. They could not understand that he was on God's mission, and that he knew God would give him plenty of wealth without his having to take it from a common sailor. But Cristoforo dared not fail but to fulfill the Lord's instructions in every particular. If God had ordained that he be first to lay eyes upon the far-off kingdoms of the Orient, then Cristoforo could not thwart God's will in this, not even out of sympathy for de Triana. Nor could he even share some portion of the reward with Triana, for word would get out and people would assume that it was, not Cristoforo's mercy and compassion, but rather his guilty conscience that made him give the money. His claim to have seen land must stand unassailed forever, lest the will of God be undone. As for Rodrigo de Triana, God would surely provide him with decent compensation for his loss.
It would have been nice if, now that all the struggle was near fruition, God had let something be simple.
* * *
No measurements are exact. The temporal field was supposed to form a perfect sphere that exactly scoured the inside of the hemisphere, sending the passenger and his supplies back in time while leaving the metal bowl behind in the future. Instead, Hunahpu found himself rocking gently in a portion of the bowl, a fragment of metal so thin that he could see leaves through the edges of it. For a moment he wondered how he would get out, for metal so thin would surely have an edge that would slice right through his skin. But then the metal shattered under the strain and fell in thin crumbling sheets on the ground. His supplies tumbled down among the fragile shards.
Hunahpu got up and walked gingerly, gathering up the thin sheets carefully and making a pile of them near the base of a tree. Their biggest fear, in delivering him on land, was that the sphere of his temporal field would bisect a tree, causing the top half of it to drop like a battering ram onto Hunahpu and his supplies. So they had put him as near the beach as they dared without running a serious risk of dropping him in the ocean. But the measurements were not exact. One large tree was not three meters from the edge of the field.
No matter. He had missed the tree. The slight miscalculation in the size of the field had at least been in the direction of including too much rather than slicing off a portion of his equipment. And with luck they would have come close enough to the right timeframe that he would be in good time to accomplish his work before the Europeans came.
It was early morning, and Hunahpu's greatest danger would come from being sighted too soon. This stretch of beach had been chosen because it was rarely visited; only if they had missed their target date by several weeks would someone be within sight of him. But he had to act as if the worst had happened. He had to be careful.
Soon he had everything out of sight among the bushes. He sprayed himself again with insect repellent, just to be sure, and began the labor of carrying everything from the shore to the hiding place he had selected among the rocks a kilometer inland.
It took him most of the day. He rested then, and allowed himself the luxury of pondering his future. I am here in the land of my ancestors, or at least a place near to it. There is no retreat. If I don't bring it off, I'll end up as a sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli or perhaps some Zapotecan god. Even if Diko and Kemal made it, their target dates were years in the future from this place where I am now. I am alone in this world, and everything depends on me. Even if the others fail, I have it in my power to undo Columbus. All I have to do is turn the Zapotecs into a great nation, link up with the Tarascans, accelerate the development of ironworking and shipbuilding, block the Tlaxcalans and overthrow the Mexica, and prepare these people for a new ideology that does not include human sacrifice. Who couldn't do that?
It had looked so easy on paper. So logical, such a simple progression from one step to the next. But now, knowing no one in this place, all alone with the most pathetic of equipment, really, which could not be replaced or repaired if it failed ...
Enough of that, he told himself. I still have a few hours before dark. I must find out when I have arrived. I have rendezvous to keep.
Before dark he had located the nearest Zapotec village, Atetulka, and, because he had watched this village over and over a
gain on the TruSite II, he recognized what day it was from what he saw the people doing. There had been no important error in the temporal field, so far as date was concerned. He had arrived when he was supposed to, and he had the option of making himself known to this village in the morning.
He winced at the thought of what he would have to do to make ready, and then walked back to his cache in the dusk. He waited for the jaguar that he had watched so many times, dropped it with a tranquilizer dart, then killed it and skinned it, so he could arrive at Atetulka wearing the skin. They would not lay hands readily upon a Jaguar Man, especially when he identified himself as a Maya king from the inscrutable underworld land of Xibalba. The days of Mayan greatness were long in the past, but they were well remembered all the same. The Zapotecs lived perpetually in the great shadow of the Maya civilization of centuries past. The Interveners had come to Columbus dressed up in the image of the God he believed in; Hunahpu would do the same. The difference was that he would have to live on with the people he was deceiving and continue to manipulate them successfully for the rest of his life.
This all had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
* * *
Cristoforo wouldn't let any of the ships sail for land until full light. It was an unknown coast, and, impatient as they all were to set foot on solid earth again, there was no use in risking even one ship when there might be reefs or rocks.
The daylight passage proved him right. The approaches were treacherous, and it was only by deft sailing that Cristoforo was able to guide them in to shore. Let them say he was no sailor now, thought Cristoforo. Could Pinzўn himself have done better than I just did?
Pastwatch: The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus Page 25
