Pastwatch

by Orson Scott Card

  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 full 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 together 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.

  It was there that he saw Felipa, or rather made sure that she saw him. He had made discreet inquiries about several young ladies, and learned much that was promising about her. Her father, Governor Perestrello, had been a man of some distinction and influence, with a tenuous claim on nobility that no one contested during his lifetime because he had been one of the young seafarers trained by Prince Henry the Navigator and had
taken part with distinction in the conquest of Madeira. As a reward, he had been made governor of the small island of Porto Santo, a nearly waterless place of little value except for the prestige it gave him back in Lisbon. Now he was dead, but he was not forgotten, and the man who married his daughter would be able to meet seafarers and make contacts in court that could eventually bring him before the king.

  Felipa’s brother was still governor of the island, and Felipa’s mother, Dona Moniz, ruled over the family—including the brother—with an iron hand. It was she, not Felipa, whom Columbus had to impress; but first he had to catch Felipa’s eye. It was not hard to do. The story of Columbus’s long swim to shore after the famous battle between the Genovese merchant fleet and the French pirate Coullon was often told. Columbus made it a point to deny any heroism. “All I did was throw pots and set ships afire, including my own. Braver and better men than I fought and died. And then . . . I swam. If the sharks had thought I looked appetizing I wouldn’t be here. Is this a hero?” But such self-deprecation in a society much given to boasting was exactly the pose that he knew he had to take. People love to hear the brag of the local boy, because they want him to be great, but the foreigner must deny that he has any outstanding virtue—this is what will endear him to the locals.

  It worked well enough. Felipa had heard of him, and in church he caught her looking at him and bowed. She blushed and turned away. A rather homely girl. Her father was a warrior and her mother was built like a fortress—the daughter had her father’s fierceness and her mother’s formidable thickness. Yet there was a glint of grace and humor in her smile when she glanced back at him, once the obligatory blush had passed. She knew it was a game they were playing, and she didn’t mind. After all, she was not a prime prospect, and if the man who wooed her was an ambitious Genovese who wanted to use her family connections, how was that different from the daughters of more fortunate families who were wooed by ambitious lords who wanted to use their families’ wealth? A woman of rank could hardly expect to be married for her own virtues—those had only a minor effect on the asking price, as long as she was a virgin, and that family asset, at least, had been well protected.

  Glances in church led to a call on the Perestrello household, where Dona Moniz received him five times before agreeing to let him meet Felipa, and then only after the marriage was all but agreed upon. It was established that Columbus would have to give up openly practicing a trade—his voyages could no longer be so obviously commercial, and his brother Bartholomew, who had joined him from Genova, would become the proprietor of the chart shop that Columbus had started. Columbus would merely be a gentleman who occasionally stopped by to advise his tradesman brother. This suited both Columbus and Bartholomew.

  At last Columbus met Felipa, and not long afterward they were married. Dona Moniz knew perfectly well what this Genovese adventurer was after, or thought she did, and she was quite certain that no sooner would he have gained entrée into courtly society than he would immediately begin to establish liaisons with prettier—and richer—mistresses, angling for ever more advantageous connections in court. She had seen his type a thousand times before, and she saw through him. So, just before the wedding, she surprised everyone by announcing that her son, the governor of Porto Santo, had invited Felipa and her new husband to come live with him on the island. And Dona Moniz herself would of course come with them, since there was no reason for her to stay in Lisbon when her dear daughter Felipa and her precious son the governor—her whole family, and never mind the other married daughters—were hundreds of miles away out in the Atlantic Ocean. Besides, the Madeira Islands had a warmer and more healthful climate.

  Felipa thought it was a wonderful idea, of course—she had always loved the island—but to Dona Moniz’s surprise, Columbus also accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. He managed to hide his amusement at her obvious discomfiture. If he wanted to go, then there must be something wrong with the plan—he knew that was how she was thinking. But that was because she had no notion of what mattered to him. He was in the service of God, and while eventually he would have to present himself in court to win approval for a westward voyage, it would be years before he was prepared to make his case. He needed experience; he needed charts and books; he needed time to think and plan. Poor Dona Moniz—she didn’t realize that Porto Santo put him directly on the sailing route of the Portuguese expeditions along the African coast. They all put in at Madeira, and there Columbus would be able to learn much about how to lead expeditions, how to chart unknown territories, how to navigate long distances in unknown seas. Old Perestrello, Felipa’s late father, had kept a small but valuable library at Porto Santo, and Columbus would have access to it. Thus, if he could learn some of the Portuguese skills in navigation, if God led him to hidden information in his studies of the old writings, he might learn something encouraging about his coming voyage to the west.

  The voyage was brutal for Felipa. She had never been seasick before, and by the time they arrived at Porto Santo, Dona Moniz was sure that she and Columbus had already conceived a child. Sure enough, nine months later Diego was born. Felipa took a long time recovering from the pregnancy and birth, but as soon as she was strong enough she devoted herself to the child. Her mother viewed this with some distaste, since there were nurses for that kind of thing, but she could hardly complain, for it soon became obvious that Diego was all that Felipa had; her husband did not seem hungry for her company. Indeed, he seemed eager to get off the island at every opportunity—but not for the sake of getting to court. Instead, he kept begging for chances to get onto a ship sailing along the African coast.

  The more he begged, the less likely it seemed that he would get a chance to join a voyage. He was, after all, Genovese, and it occurred to more than one ship’s captain that Columbus might have married into a sailing family as a ploy to learn the African coast and then return to Genova and bring Italian ships into competition with the Portuguese. That would be intolerable, or course. So there was never a question of Columbus getting what he really wanted.

  With her husband so frustrated, Felipa began to pressure her mother to do something for her Cristovão. He loves the sea, Felipa said. He dreams of great voyages. Can’t you do something for him?

  So she brought her son-in-law into her late husband’s library and opened for him the boxes of charts and maps, the cases of precious books. Columbus’s gratitude was palpable. For the first time it occurred to her that perhaps he was sincere—that he had little interest in the African coast, that it was navigation that inspired him, voyaging for its own sake that he longed for.

  Columbus began to spend almost every waking moment poring over the books and charts. Of course there were no charts for the western ocean, for no one who had sailed beyond the Azores or the Canaries or the Cape Verde Islands ever returned. Columbus learned, though, that the Portuguese voyagers had disdained to hug the coast of Africa. Instead, they sailed far out to sea, using better winds and deeper waters until their instruments told them that they had sailed as far south as the last voyage had reached. Then they would sail landward, eastward, hoping that this time they would find a route leading eastward to India. It was that deep-sea sailing that had first brought Portuguese sailors to Madeira and then to the Cape Verde Islands. Some adventurers of the time had imagined that there might be chains of islands stretching farther to the west, and had sailed to see, but such voyages always ended in either disappointment or tragedy, and no one believed anymore that there were more islands to the west or south.

  But Columbus could not disregard the records of old rumors that once had led sailors to search for westward islands. He devoured the rumors of a dead sailor washed ashore in the Azores or Canaries or Cape Verdes, a waterlogged chart tucked into his clothing showing western islands reached before his ship sank, the stories of floating logs from unknown species of tree, of flocks of land birds far away to the south or west, of corpses of drowned men with rounder faces than any seen in Europe, dark and yet not as
black of skin as Africans, either. These all dated from an earlier time, and Columbus knew they represented the wishful thinking of a brief era. But he knew what none of them could know—that God intended Columbus to reach the great kingdoms of the east by sailing west, which meant that perhaps these rumors were not all wishful thinking, that perhaps they were true.

  Even if they were, however, they would be unconvincing to those who would decide whether to fund a westward expedition. To persuade the king would mean first persuading the learned men of his court, and that would require serious evidence, not sailors’ lore. For that purpose the real treasure of Porto Santo were the books, for Perestrello had loved the study of geography, and he had Latin translations of Ptolemy.

  Ptolemy was cold comfort for Columbus—he had it that from the westernmost tip of Europe to the easternmost tip of Asia was 180 degrees, half the circumference of the earth. Such a voyage over open ocean would be hopeless. No ship could carry enough supplies or keep them fresh long enough to cover even a quarter of that distance.

  Yet God had told him that he could reach the Orient by sailing west. Therefore Ptolemy must be wrong, and not just slightly wrong, either. He must be drastically, hopelessly wrong. And Columbus had to find a way to prove it, so that a king would allow him to lead ships to the west to fulfill the will of God.

  It would be simpler, he said in his silent prayers to the Holy Trinity, if you sent an angel to tell the King of Portugal. Why did you choose me? No one will listen to me.